Movies are one of my guilty pleasures. I’ve always loved going to the movies, and with the advent of VCRs, enjoyed watching them at home. Now, just over a generation later, we have DVD players, and on the horizon is the next generation of DVDs. It’s amazing sometimes how technology evolves so fast. The current generation of college students has most likely never gone (or rarely gone) to a deaf club or similar organization to watch a movie. Now everyone can gather in their dorm rooms and apartments to watch the latest flick. You also don’t have to drive or walk down to the corner video store anymore; there’s Netflix, and Blockbuster has its own DVD-by-mail service. Even Wal-Mart was in on the action for a while.

Despite the advantages of staying at home on the couch to watch the latest Hollywood release, there’s still something about going to an actual theater that attracts me. Of course, these days, with the prices, I don’t do this as often as I used to. But occasionally there’s the hit summer movie (such as “Revenge of the Sith”) or a movie that you know will end up an Oscar nominee (like “Mystic River”) that either are best viewed in their original intended format (for example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy’s great no matter what, but admit it: it looks ten times better on a big screen than it does on your set, doesn’t it?), or are worth paying close to ten bucks for.

The first films I recall seeing in an actual movie theater with captions/subtitles that weren’t foreign were “Children of a Lesser God” and “Schindler’s List.” Within the next few years, the list of movies I saw in the theater without any barriers whatsoever proliferated, and today I have more options than I did twenty years ago. Yet in those twenty years, some things remain constant.

First, there still isn’t the option to go to any movie, any time, at any theater. Second, often, even in large metro areas, theaters that offer accessible showings are at a distance from where I and my friends live. No walking down to the corner bijou to catch the latest flick. Third, there are competing formats, with no standardization whatsoever. Fourth, it’s hard to get theater owners on board, and even when they’re willing to offer captioned movies in whatever form, there’s not always the same enthusiasm to continue.

As you probably already know, there’s currently three formats for enjoying a movie: OC, or open-captions; DTS, or digital captioning; and RWC, known as Rear-Window Captioning. OC is the oldest, and started way back when, thanks to pioneers like Emerson Romero. This format requires burning the dialogue into the print itself, frame by frame. This means that the print is permanently captioned. For years, the government-sponsored Captioned Films and Videos (today known as CMP) program through NAD had tons of movies for loan, and some of you may remember going to your local deaf club or organization on certain nights to watch a movie. Today, CMP has radically reduced the number of commercial films available and offers more DVD copies than VHS or old 16mm films. Tripod took up the torch, and recently changed its name to InSight Cinema. While this is our traditional method, for a long time it meant if you didn’t live in a highly dense deaf population area like Rochester, you had to wait anywhere from 1-4 months to see the latest film. The movies would often be shown once, maybe twice, at predetermined times and days of the weeks, usually once mid-week during the day, and again mid-week at night. Lately there have been some improvements, and seeing a popular or new film is possible in a much shorter time than four months.

DTS is the newer version of OC films– instead of burning the dialogue into the print itself, the dialogue is now on a disc, and is played on a special machine, where it is projected onto the screen. This means only the disc itself needs to be transported or shipped, not the entire film. This is exciting new technology, and theoretically can solve a lot of the problems of the past. But the problem is that the projecting equipment is expensive, and not all theaters are aware of this new tool. Additionally, there have been technical problems from time to time. Fellow columnist Tayler Mayer described one such frustrating experience in his column back in July.

RWC is the third method– by using a portable plexiglass “screen”, the user adjusts the screen and through that views “closed captions” that are projected onto the screen in a manner similar to DTS. This format has spread to many theaters, and in some ways has overcome the problem of scheduling. Here in L.A. I can usually see a movie via RWC a week or two after it opens, and at any time of night or day, for a week or so. But the screen has to be adjusted, it can be difficult to view the captions if you’re not the right height or sitting in the right part of the theater, and to be honest, it’s exhausting to watch a movie this way. Personally, I prefer subtitles/open captions, and I suspect a lot of people would agree with me.

For a long time, WGBH, via its MoPix website, offered information on where to see these movies. But in June of this year, they stopped, saying the theater chains and corporations themselves needed to assume the burden of advertising the movies. While I agree with this logic, the switchover was handled somewhat ineptly. While the MoPix folks assured people the changeover would take a “short time,” a major chain, AMC, is still linking its California theatres to MoPix’s now defunct site (if you scroll down, though, AMC seems to now be posting all the information– so it may just be a matter of their web designer needing to wake up, smell the coffee, and redesign the webpage!). A number of other chains are somewhere along the continuum, with some having made the full switch to providing information both on- and off-line about their RWC/OC/DTS showings, while others, like AMC, have quite a bit more work to do.

So what to do? I’ve provided a superficial background of sorts; next time I’ll delve a little bit more into this subject, and what we, as deaf consumers, can do.